How We Really Feel Around Unfair People

Want a lively conversation starter? Try this. Call it Situational Empathy. Suppose you see some people acting unfairly. Which sex is more inclined to be empathetic – in spite of the "bad" behavior they are witnessing?

Women. At least according to recent research by a team led by University College of London neuroscientist, Tania Singer.

They recruited volunteers to play a game with employees of Singer's lab. Some employees were asked to play by the rules and others were instructed to not play fair. After the game, scientists measured the some of the volunteers' brain activity as they observed some of their former game opponents apparently being subjected to different levels of pain.

In all volunteer observers, the brain areas that signal pain became active, demonstrating their empathy with the others' pain.

Yet, when "unfair" game-playing employees appeared to be in pain, the male volunteers (but not the females) showed considerably less empathetic brain activity than when they saw fair-players perceiving pain. In fact men expressed more desire for revenge.

In short, female volunteers showed the brain responses of empathy regardless of how they felt about the employees' moral behavior. Yet, the male volunteers' brain responses depended on how fairly the employee had played. Earlier research supports this finding.

As a woman I don't feel especially proud of my instinctual reaction yet I think I'd have responded more like a man in this experiment.

This growing field of brain research has much to show us about what makes us feel safe, connected and loved. Learn more about how our behavior is affected by brain hormones (like vasopressin and oxytocin) in Edward O. Wilson and Donald Pfaff's book, The Neuroscience of Fair Play.

Here's the good news. Mean and women can use meditation to change our instinctively negative reactions - even in the face of wrong-doing or otherwise difficult behavior. Monitoring the brains of Tibetan monks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, renowned neuroscience professor Richard Davidson found that the monks first instinct was compassion rather than anger.

The much less good news, at least for many Westerners? That the monks who'd trained their minds for such positive reactions have spent at least 10,000 hours in meditation. Discover more on this topic later this year when the expert on reading faces and emotion, Paul Ekman comes out with his book, based on 40 hours of conversation with the Dalai Lama.